Monday, January 23, 2017

On The Darkest Timeline: An Ode to Meat

I started a new antidepressant. It’s
odd, to tinker with your brain chemistry in this way (recreational drug users
will know what I’m talking about). Add a little juice in one way or another,
and the meat feels and thinks differently.

The question is inescapable: Why Meat?
What’s the purpose of it? Clearly, the meat has its own wants and desires:
respiration, reproduction, and so on. But is meaning or purpose extricable from
the meat? The theologians posit a soul, but there are a lot of implicit
assumptions that need to be made, and Occam’s razor makes it difficult to
support them. At any rate, if souls exist, they seem fairly inconsequential,
which brings us right back to our original problem.

We currently stand on the precipice of
a new phase in history. Within the next few decades, more than 95% of all jobs
will become superfluous. In a historical blink of an eye, AI will replace human
beings in doing just about everything.

So while the question of purpose is
best left to chemical mal-adjusts and broody teenagers, it is an issue that
humanity will need to answer for itself — and quickly. Humans are social
animals, gift-giving meat. What will their purpose be, when everything else is
stripped away? Even assuming everything goes well, and humanity is able to use
AI to achieve universal happiness and prosperity… what then? Creating art for
other bored people? Escaping into simulated worlds?

I don’t know the answers; nihilists
aren’t known for being productive. But I know enough about humans and human
psychology to know that people need to have purpose, and need to feel like what
they do matters, and is important. While it is obvious from my tortured vantage
point that there is no purpose to it, most people are incapable of functioning
on that level (plus it’s a profoundly toxic attitude). But I worry that as
people are displaced en masse, we may
soon find out what happens when humanity has nihilism forced upon us.